Understanding erasure poetry and some examples

Erasure poetry is a sort of discovered poetry wherein the artist takes a current source text and makes their own sonnet by deleting, redacting, or in any case clouding the words in the first content. The subsequent content of the last sonnet can be orchestrated into lines or verses, or it can stay as it showed up on the first page of text.

Doris Cross is believed to be one of the first to utilize the erasure strategy in poetry with her 1965 “Word reference Columns.” Other notable erasure poems include:

A Humument by Tom Phillips

Radi Os by Ronald Johnson

Nets by Jen Bervin

I Am Not Famous Anymore by Erin Dorney

The ms of my family by Janet Holmes (adjusted from the poems of Emily Dickinson)